We No Longer Dream of the United States: Bartosz Wieliński on America, Poland, and the Suicide of a Superpower

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. We're still on the road in Europe. We're in Warsaw today. And I've had the good fortune of coming to the New York Times of Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza. And I'm here with Bartosz Wieliński, who's the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper Bartosz. Welcome to Keen On America.

**Bartosz Wieliński** (0:53)
Hi, hello.

**Andrew Keen** (0:55)
You smile, Bartosz, but you're very disappointed with the United States, aren't you?

**Bartosz Wieliński** (1:00)
I'm a little disappointed. Maybe too strong, I'd say. I just lost the illusions towards US. And, well, people in my generation worship the United States, worship in Communism. Everybody wanted to move, to flee to US. It was the land of the dream. And now we confront with different type of country, different type of politics. And we see all those changes that, well, are striking.
Are simply bad. And, well, as I said, we lost our... The dreams we used to have 20, 30, 40 years ago, they're not there. We don't dream on the US anymore.

**Andrew Keen** (1:43)
You've lost your innocence, Bartosz?

**Bartosz Wieliński** (1:45)
Lost what?

**Andrew Keen** (1:46)
You've lost your innocence.

**Bartosz Wieliński** (1:47)
Innocence? Well, it's not the innocence. I didn't lose anything. The US did, I'd say. The Americans lost their credibility. They lost the values they believed in. They lost their mind by electing a guy like Donald Trump to be president of the US.
So if anybody lost anything, it is the Americans, not the Poles.

**Andrew Keen** (2:11)
What's your message to people in the United States who voted for Trump?

**Bartosz Wieliński** (2:16)
Well, you did it wrong, guys. And if you don't see it now, then you should look around. It's all is screwed simply with the US. You have the president who is, well, Timothy Snyder said quite a wise thing on that, saying that this is a suicide of the superpower. And the US was a superpower, probably still is a superpower. But Donald Trump's doing a lot to cripple that superpower, at least to cripple it. He lost credibility, he lost morality.
We don't live in 20th or 19th century anymore.
and to shoot airplanes and bomb a city, a bomb a school with children, doesn't mean...

**Andrew Keen** (3:20)
You're referring to Iran.

**Bartosz Wieliński** (3:21)
Yeah, I'm referring to Iran. Doesn't mean that you are a superpower. Superpower is something more than a super strength.
And there's more questions. Well, the paramongers in Pentagon, in Department Of War would laugh at that, but you need to be moral, you need to be credible, you need to have allies and friends and supporters. In America, I lost both.

**Andrew Keen** (3:44)
What is the suicide of a superpower? I mean, you quoted Timothy Snyder on that, Tim's been on the show before. What do you mean by that?

**Bartosz Wieliński** (3:54)
Well, I understand it like deliberately harming yourself. Because well, Donald Trump didn't have to start a trade war with other countries. Of course, there are issues, serious issues, in the commercial exchange between US and other partners. But you could discuss a lot of things. There are ways diplomacy knows that, and partners, and foreign partners, they understood the situation. And you could discuss it, not to impose a decision, which were, in the end, harmful not for Europeans, but harmful for US citizens.
You should have had better advisers than Benjamin Netanyahu in the case of Middle East. And all those spiritually obsessed people who pushed Americans for this senseless escalation. US started the war with Iran without having strategic objectives. What were the objectives of bombing Iran? Nobody knows about it. Nobody heard about it. Nobody heard Trump saying what his objective in Iran was. Probably he assumed that when he captured Maduro, he could do the same thing with Khomeini. But this strategy failed in the first few days of this confrontation. Americans had a lot of friends in the world, had a lot of influence. US aid was a powerful tool of so-called soft power, of persuading people from other countries to values like democracy, rule of law, freedom of the media. Americans could have changed a lot, could have made a difference. In the countries where democracy and respect toward human rights is not a certain thing. And they deliberately destroyed the system, saying we need to save money. They were the best invested US money ever in growing democracy and fostering democracy in countries like Moldova, like Bosnia, like, well, countries in, some countries in Africa and in Asia where there's still chances that there won't be a pure dictatorship. And they simply destroyed that. And well, NATO is the same thing. NATO was extremely profitable investment for the US because NATO was protecting the US.